Six months ago when I first started writing for Stratejoy I thought that by now I’d have a great job, be living in a great apartment, surrounded by amazing people – i.e my life before I moved back to New York.

That reality hasn’t happened.

I’m still unemployed, chilling with the parents an uncomfortable commute away from my friends. I still feel as though my life is a mass of unconnected dots and like I’m having a hard time finding a pen never mind figuring out the pattern I’m supposed to discern from the mass of dots which I swear move when I’m not looking.

It feels a bit like trying to pin the tail on the bucking bronco.

I am, I keep reminding myself, exactly where I need to be. The six months that I’ve spent writing for Stratejoy (and doing my own Joy Plan) have really forced me to take a good hard look at myself and at how I relate to the world. I’ve done a lifetime worth of soul searching and have managed to cultivate a level of patience the Dalai Lamai himself would envy. Sometimes, like right now, I even find myself being taken over by a deep sense of peace.

And, while a life unexamined is not a life worth living, there is such a thing as too much introspection. You can get caught up in your own head, and doing that introspection on a public platform can I think feed the crazies. As the wise Miley Cyrus (yeah I said wise) put it, can get easy to stop living for moments and start living for people.

While sharing my life and my thoughts the past few months have been really helpful in terms of finding my center and my own sense of peace (as well as helping me recognize that I’m not alone), I feel as though I’m at a place where I need to back off a little bit.

Much as a caterpillar enters a chrysalis to emerge a beautiful butterfly, I feel I need a break from publicly examining my own life, to enter into my own cocoon so that I can find my own inner butterfly.

It is, I think, impossible to truly transform while people are watching.

So thank you reader for being a part in my journey, for reading, for commiserating and I hope for laughing a little. It’s been a joy and an honor and I wish you best on your own journey.

In my heart of hearts I am a SciFi/Fantasy dork so I think closing with this quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would be fitting:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

With much peace and love,

[Kendra.  It's hard for me to sit here and not be moved by your "outer struggle" right now.  The part that allows me to make peace with it?  I know you've been undergoing some incredible inner growth.  The clarity and beauty of your posts have given all of us an incredible glimpse into your challenges, as well as your celebrations.  Believe me when I say this--that mass of dots?  Soon enough it will connect itself into a beautiful picture.  A stunning representation of your right life.  I believe it in my heart of hearts.  Thank you for sharing such an intimate slice of your reality.  It's been an inspiration and a source of many discussions in my world.  Love, Molly]

photo credit: Vicki’s Nature

A friend sent me a link the other day to a book that a college classmate is having published this spring. My friend stumbled upon this nugget of information in a bit of classmate stalking.

“So and so is a published writer now”, my friend wrote to me with a mixture of jealousy and derision.

Inside a part of me sang.

I can’t deny that sometimes when I take a step backwards and look at the expanse of my life which is long on memories but short on stuff, I’m left wondering if I’ve done the right thing. When I end up at yet another perfectly decorated housewarming, or at a party of someone in a part of town that I couldn’t afford to rent a toilet never mind own an apartment, it’s hard to remember that I’ve climbed to the top of a volcano, gone body surfing in Biarritz, rang in the New Year in Dublin.

It’s much easier to remember that I’m thirty (yep my birthday was last week), unemployed, single, living at home, with just enough possessions to fill the back of my dad’s SUV.

I don’t even own a car.

I wonder if I shouldn’t have used my twenties to ramble, to ping pong, and flit and instead used it to plod the path that society said I should have taken. The path that at 24 I felt was soul crushing, but now staring down at thirty and longing for security, stability and companionship seems comforting in its own way. The path, in other words, that a lot of my friends and acquaintances have taken, to when I take a step back and assess objectively, to mixed results.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the comparison game; no matter how relatively successful society deems you. And the vague sense of unease and jealousy espoused by my friend, who by many measure’s of society is successful, in the shadow of our classmates accomplishments made me feel better about myself.

Not because, as Calvin and Hobbes so succinctly put it that nothing helps a bad mood so much than spreading it around, but because his jealousy helped remind me that in the comparison game nobody wins.

At a party a few weeks ago I was talking to a guy who expressed jealousy at how much I’d traveled. I was totally jealous that he had a job. The funny thing is, finances aside we were in much the same situation: afloat. His Investment Banking job was poised to end, making business school his only possible option, and his long-term relationship which had been headed towards marriage derailed leaving him totally single.

I guess the truth is there is no such thing as the safe path, the guaranteed path.  There is merely our path, and we can walk it with strength or with trepidation and fear but we will have to walk it nonetheless.

We may as well have a good time while we’re doing it.

My freshman year of college floor mate, a short distance track runner who had turned down an acceptance from West Point but still had the discipline to match a military school cadet, had placed a homemade sign above her desk which read:

Pain is the weakness leaving your body.

It is one of those cliché’s that run through fitness circles that I, as a recovering anti-exercise activist (I still hate gyms) used to alternate between mocking and merely ignoring.

But the other day as my DVD trainer (i.e. the trainer leading the way on my new exercise DVD), pointed out that stress is what strengthens our body; I realized that my friend’s sign had within it a kernel of truth. Pain is the weakness leaving the body, and stress is what we need to strengthen us.

Yes, there is good stress and bad stress and like anything in life such a thing as too much stress, but ultimately we tend to talk about stress as a bad thing when really, stress can be good. The stress of a Quarterlife Crisis for example can allows us to become stronger, more centered, more generous, more grounded human beings.

This isn’t a given.

Emotional stress can beat us down and take away our light, just like physical stress can lead to breaks, strains, sprains and other physical injuries.

For example, I recently caught a talk show episode about women with sleeping pill addictions. Most of these women had gone to the doctor with real sleep issues that had spiraled into a physical addiction spurred on by a complex of situation (insomnia) and poor handling by their doctors. Their emotional stress had led to well, more stress.

But watching them me realize how lucky I was that my own dalliance with insomnia led me not to addiction, but to a shift in habits. I’ve learned how to cope with stress through meditation, exercise, and a host of other positive behaviors that I’m sure will serve to help me in the future as I come into contact with more of life’s hiccups.

In other words, this round of emotional stress has made me a stronger human being.

I just haven’t been able to see it because of the pain that comes with it, much as we often don’t feel stronger in the days immediately after a tough workout because the strength is obscured by sore muscles.

Viewing emotional stress, not as a negative, but as a round of emotional weight lifting is an interesting shift in thinking and one that moves us from the role of Victim to Actor. And I for one find that this is a role that I may not relish but can more easily sink my teeth into.

That said, I’d still much rather lay on my couch with a pint of cookie dough ice cream in tow then deal with weight lifting: emotional or otherwise.

photo credit : lanraga

For months now only one thought has propelled me forward: 2010.

I have wanted to put the general crappiness of 2009 in my rearview mirror since at least August.

Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of December preparing for the tweenies aka 2010.

I went through box after box of my stuff in storage and weeded out the things I no longer needed, culling from an ever dwindling amount of stuff.

I gave books and clothes to charity, stepped up my meditation practice, took several cleansing bath, enacted a solstice ritual, went belly dancing (whoops that was just for fun), saw a reiki healer (an interesting experience), and even dabbled with the thought of returning to my Catholic roots and going to confession.

Except I couldn’t figure out what to confess, `cause yep I’m just that angelic.

And now, just a handful of days into 2010 guess what? Nothing’s changed. I’ve manifested no miracles. I’m still at the same temp job, still putting in hours of ‘I thought I’d outgrown this’ retail work, still coasting on my parents couch and feeling the deep sting of disappointment that comes from yet  another round of employment rejection.

So, for 2010 I’ve made loads of private resolutions, but the one I’m willingly to publicly state is that my goal of for 2010 is to let go.

Let go of what?

Of everything. Of the person that I used to be and the person that I’d thought I’d become, of the job that I thought I’d have, of the way I believed I’d be living, of the people that I thought I’d be sharing my life with.

Because none of that is where I am right now and focusing on that, on what I wanted instead of what I have, is just making me feel worse.

So instead, I’m just going to get very still and very quiet and let life unfurl itself before me. It’s going to do so regardless.

photo credit

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about happiness.

True happiness that isn’t dependent on external circumstances but rather that arises from a deep sense of internal peace.

It’s the kind of happiness that Eastern religions often call Enlightenment.

I’ve been thinking about Enlightenment because, well, I’ve realized that I don’t want my sense of peace and contentment to be dependent on external things: the right house, the right car, the right job, the right partner, or the right friends.

All of these things, while sometimes wonderful, are ephemeral. They don’t last forever and even while they last the fear of things ending can make us miserable.  It’s like this story I read years ago by Krishnamurti that just popped into my head. A man has a wonderful job, a wonderful wife, beautiful daughters, but he lives with a constant low level of anxiety. Why? He doesn’t merely love and enjoy those things, they define him. The loss of any one of these things through divorce, firing or death means death of his sense of self.  Consequently, he lives every day in vague fear and unease at the loss of these things.

“We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.”  -Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

This is silly.

If you take a happy kid and stick her in an amusement park she will ride the rides, and fill herself with cotton candy until she is sticky with sweet and sweat and utterly exhausted.  She knows intuitively that eventually she will lose the amusement park, but that doesn’t diminish her pleasure of the amusement park today; it actually increases it. She knows that tomorrow will bear other wonders and even if it doesn’t, she has her own imagination and spirit to keep her company.

This is something that makes sense to me intellectually and intuitively and yet as I sat here I found within me a strong resistance to the idea of even striving for that kind of deep peace. The problem, I realized, wasn’t that I was afraid to fail, but rather that I feared success.

“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.” – Anthony de Mello

The way we’ve positioned enlightenment, inner peace, spiritual achievement or however else you want to phrase it, is as a solitary pursuit. Achieve enlightenment and you’ll have to go live somewhere in a yurt or travel the planet trying to spread the word of your life’s lessons. You won’t want to meet the gang for beer anymore after work (will you even work?), you won’t be able to stay with your partner or spouse, you will be an insufferable know it all and in the process of becoming enlightened you will find yourself… alone.

And I think for most of us, more than anything we fear being alone.

“Happiness is a function of accepting what is.”  -Werner Erhard

“Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.”  -Robert Anthony

So let’s look at history. The two enlightened people that I know the most about offhandedly are Jesus and the Buddha neither of whom lived solitary existences. If anything, their deep spirituality propelled them forward making it easier for them to be among people; not harder.  Both found, interestingly enough that their deep sense of inner peace didn’t isolate them, but rather connected them more deeply and without fear and actually brought people to them.

Enlightened people, apparently, are attractive people.

The Buddha was even said to have something of a kicking sense of humor.

As I release the notion that my search for happiness will somehow lead to my own unhappiness, I can’t help but wonder what other deep resistances we hold that act as barriers towards our own self-development?

photo credit: donna cymek

Barbara Ehrenreich has been making the rounds in support of her new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, Ms.Ehrenreich blames positivity for everything from the decline in social justice movements to a rise in social irresponsibility.

Curmudgeons everywhere have been rejoicing.

“Finally”, they’re saying in their knowing way, which almost but doesn’t quite, resemble joy “those Pollyanna’s are getting their comeuppance.”

There is something to be said for Ehrenreich’s argument. The fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, for example, exists to remind us that regardless of our outlook, times are not always bright. Practically speaking unemployment, illness or other unexpected events can blindside us which is why it’s important to shore up a reserve: of money, of good will, but also, of happiness.

Specifically what she is attacking is, The so-called ‘Rule of Attraction’ made popular by the movie and book The Secret. At its core (if you’ve been under a rock and have managed to ignore its teachings, and if you have can I join you in this happy wonderland?) is the belief that we attract what we focus on (like attracts like). If we focus on our unemployment for example, we attract being unemployed. We should instead focus our attention on what we want, a job for example.

Ehrenreich argues that because people were focusing on things like wealth, they allowed themselves to purchase homes without worrying if they could afford them. If they thought about the issue at all, they figured their positive thoughts would be enough to attract the money when the money was necessary. In addition, she says that this line of thinking puts tremendous responsibility on people going through trying times to put on a happy face (an idea I myself touched on awhile back) and it in effects indicts those with serious illnesses by saying they somehow attracted their illnesses.

While her arguments have validity: many of us do need a healthy sense of reality; spiritual practices can only do so much. Even the Bible stresses action (a great joke on that front can be found here). We must also recognize that practically speaking what keeps most people motivated is well… a certain level of willful positivity.

Studies have shown that depressed individuals often have a clearer view of reality than their non-depressed counterparts. Being healthy it turns out, involves a healthy amount of self-delusion.

I should know.

Being unemployed, sucks, what keeps me churning out job applications is the hope (and vision) that doing so will eventually land me a job. Similarly I can’t think of anyone who gets married thinking their marriage will end in divorce, or decides to have children thinking that their wee one will grow up to be a serial killer.

While a healthy amount of realism helps us to prepare for unexpected shocks, hiccups and bumps, it’s positivity that propels us forward. The little engine that could, after all, did not manage to chug his way up the mountain declaring “I think I can’t”.

photo credit : mcbeth

The makers of the anti-anxiety and anti-depressant drug Lexapro have a handy online guide for depression screening.

I took the quiz twice.

The first time I answered the questions in the physical and mental space I was at the beginning of this month. The second time I took the quiz I as I’m feeling now.

A month ago, in their opinion I was severely, severely depressed. And now? I am currently mildly depressed. This, my friends, is what we call progress.

I am, mostly, feeling better. Nothing in my life has really changed, but I am doing much better at handling the curve balls and mood swings. I’m settling into myself, this new self that is not the naïf I was two years ago, but is not the jaded cynic I was two months ago.

I’m not happy, but I can see myself getting there.

With this newfound sense of perspective, I found myself last night for the first time in a long time thinking of someone other than myself as I said my evening prayers.

Yes, I pray before bedtime… you never know when you just might not wake up.

Anyway as I lay in bed chatting with my maker about my day, my hopes, my dreams I found myself less concerned with…myself and more concerned with other people. I found myself praying for the sorta friend who’d recently lost a parent; the vague acquaintance that I recently learned has been unemployed for six months with the awful burden of raising a family to boot, and the friend who has been unemployed for over a year.

A lot of people, people I know even… are suffering.

I think one of the upsides of the QLC – that it forces some serious soul searching – is also one of its downsides. We can get a little too caught up in our head, and that ladies and gents is a recipe both for narcissism and some serious crazy making.

Trust me.

Today in the mail a friend sent me a necklace with the word ‘believe’ on it. She said she saw it and instantly thought of me.

I cried.

While it’s important to take some time out for self, it’s important also I think to take time out for others. To remind people, even people we don’t know so well, even people we don’t really like, that they matter.

Because they do. And so do you.

photo credit : wolfsoul

Fellow blogger Robert Brault says that, “There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed. If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude,” and I’m inclined to agree. As I’ve already touched upon, in the accounting of our memories we’re often more inclined to remember the bad stuff than the good stuff. The good stuff fades if we let it, while the bad stuff sticks out in horrid contrast, feeding into a descending spiral of gloom, doom and victimhood.

That kind of thinking will kill us if we let it.

So how do we keep ourselves upbeat, connected to our core, and to what I honestly believe is a thread of goodness trying its best to lift us upward towards genuine happiness, in a world that for all of its talk of rules of attraction and positivity, seems intent upon inundating us with an ever growing list of fears and horrors (see: the evening news)?

In other words, how do we during this Thanksgiving Season, and all year long really, stay grateful?

I’ve found a morning prayer of thanks for another day goes a long day towards helping to put me in a thankful state of mind. Before I even open my eyes I say something like thank you for this day, or thank you for this warm bed, or thank you for this quiet moment.

Similarly, closing each day by writing a quick gratitude list does a lot to help me reframe my life so I can remember the wonderful things instead of giving into the Negative Nellie need to obsessively cataloguing every perceived slight, or inconvenience, or hardship that flitted across my mind that day.

It’s a bit after 9:30AM as I write this on a blustery November day and thus far

I’ve found the following things to be grateful for:

·         My mom who has been sick all week felt good enough to go to work today, which not only speaks wonders to her health, but has the added benefit of giving me some extra quiet time I don’t have when the family is around.

·         There is a Dr. Who Marathon on the tele which means there’s a good chance I will spend the day annoying those around me with my deliciously bad British accent.

·         I have a job interview today for a job I want, for an organization that seems great, in a fun part of the city.

·         It’s sunny today which means I can wear my fancy blue coat to my job interview.

·         Oreo, our family kitten has fallen off the window sill at least three times. This is an action I find uproariously funny despite the fact that he does this everyday several times a day. He is now eyeing our hanging ivy like it is his prey.

·         I am in a good mood for no specific reason and feel a bit like my old darkly happy self than I have in ages. It’s like I’m buzzing from the inside.

·         Stratejoy! I look at where I was when I started writing this blog four months ago and where I am now and I am in such an emotionally better place even if the details of my life haven’t changed so much. Writing this blog has been such a good outlet, forcing me to express myself and really think about myself and my problems and come to the very important conclusion that I was creating most of my pain.

·         You guys! The comments on the blog have been awesome and as much as I get cathartic release in talking about this stuff, hearing that other people feel similarly is wonderful. Misery loves company, after all, and so does good cheer! Hear, hear!

So every week I write this blog, and when it goes live I send a mass e-mail out to my friends and repost it on Facebook.

Almost every week I get a phone call, or an e-mail, or a comment on either the blog or on Facebook from a friend or stranger telling me that they understand what I’m feeling, because they’re feeling it too and they want to reassure me that I’m not alone, or that they find comfort in my words and in knowing that they’re not alone.

We are an odd species aren’t we?

We crave companionship; humans – even the most introverted amongst us – are by nature a communal animal.

We need each other.

But we spend most of our time pretending that we don’t.

It is hard to be emotionally vulnerable. I know. This may sound contradictory given my status as a blogger, but I am an intensely private person.  Anything beyond the broadest outlines of my life’s experiences is only known to the people who have lived through those experiences with me.

Put another way, what I’ve written on this blog is probably about as much as most of the people that I consider my friends know about my life, excluding direct experiences (I am, however, more than happy to discuss my bowel movements and my current emotional state with aplomb, I do an excellent job of creating intimacy without being actually intimate).

Case in point, I was at lunch about a month ago with a friend, when he made a passing comment based on a banal but false assumption about a member of my family.  I paused for a moment, wondering if I should correct him, before reluctantly informing him that his assumption was actually incorrect (I have this thing about lying, even by omission, I mostly don’t do it).  He looked at me, shocked, before stating in hushed tones “that he didn’t know that”.

What he didn’t know wasn’t that important (but, no I’m not telling you). It wasn’t anything dramatic like my dad being in prison (he’s not, it’s just an example), it was on the level of finding out that I’d gone to Catholic school, but the detail wasn’t about me and so I’d felt zero need to share it, even with someone who’d become a fast friend and who I was regularly chatting with for several hours every day.

He didn’t know the detail, because among the many things that I don’t talk about a big one is I don’t talk about my family. My friend Kam says I talk about my family so rarely it’s almost as though I don’t have one.  To me this is funny, because when I’m not living at home I talk to my family as often as once a week and at least once a month. I just don’t talk about them.

But lately I’ve been wondering if this need for privacy, to erect barriers between us and the world is always such a good thing. On the one hand, we do end up protected from people who might deliberately or not-so-deliberately be emotionally harmful. On the other hand, however, we end up suffering alone during these periods of transition.

And so maybe, in order to lighten up, we should open up, even if we’re picky with whom we open up to.

photo credit : lady-bug

I was laying in bed vaguely watching back-to-back-to-back rerun episodes of the canceled television series Joan of Arcadia when the exact language for what I had been trying for weeks to craft into words to describe my own emotional state over the past few months to my friends were beautifully spoken by one of the show’s principal characters.

The character, Helen, a mother who has just learned that her daughter has been rushed to the hospital with a serious illness just a year or so after her eldest son had been permanently paralyzed in a car accident says to her husband, Will, who has just expressed feelings of deep despair over a life that seems to be spiraling into darkness:

Helen: We go through times of consolation and desolation. Consolation is when things are flowing, and everything makes sense, and you feel connected… Desolation is the other thing. When you are scared and confused and alone and out of step, and your cell phone doesn’t work, and your daughter gets sick and the cops come to the door and say there’s been an accident. God retreats, and you’re left with your own thoughts, and those thoughts are dark. There are answers there… And strength.

Will: How long does desolation last?

Helen: As long as it needs to.

I found real comfort in her words.

Sometimes, life knocks us down and we just have to feel sad for awhile. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not angst, or depression, it’s just sadness. I’m not disregarding depression, which can be debilitating, but I think it’s too often lumped together. Sadness is a natural human state, much like happiness is.

And just like joy is a response to a circumstance, so too is sadness.

Sadness can tell us that we need to look inside ourselves, nurture ourselves, rebuild connections with friends and family, connect with larger community, or otherwise change our life.  It is not a defect or a problem to be sad… sadness is feedback, telling us that something is out of balance and gently nudging us to rebalance our lives.

And that takes action, yes, but also and most importantly time.

It’s something to remember when I’m feeling the social pressure to “just be happy”.

photo credit: w00dy